Milky Way

Rose Mayr's former boyfriend, Boris Gamazaychikov, wrote a poem about the young woman, who was killed in a train derailment shortly before midnight Tuesday. "Sometimes I imagined we would grow old together. But now I'll grow old and you'll stay young in my heart forever. And I couldn't ever see you stuck behind a picket fence. You were too busy looking at the sky and the horizon to which it led. "Remember when we climbed to the top of the earth, through the bushes and the thorns we were covered in dirt.

Gart Westerhout, an internationally known radio astronomer who established the astronomy department at the University of Maryland, College Park and was scientific director at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, died Sunday of congestive heart failure at the Charlestown retirement community in Catonsville. He was 85. The son of an architect and a writer, he was born and raised in The Hague, Netherlands, where he also graduated from high school. Dr. Westerhout earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics, physics and astronomy in 1950 from the University of Leiden, and earned his master's degree in the discipline in 1954.

Gart Westerhout, an internationally known radio astronomer who established the astronomy department at the University of Maryland, College Park and was scientific director at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, died Sunday of congestive heart failure at the Charlestown retirement community in Catonsville. He was 85. The son of an architect and a writer, he was born and raised in The Hague, Netherlands, where he also graduated from high school. Dr. Westerhout earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics, physics and astronomy in 1950 from the University of Leiden, and earned his master's degree in the discipline in 1954.

Rose Mayr's former boyfriend, Boris Gamazaychikov, wrote a poem about the young woman, who was killed in a train derailment shortly before midnight Tuesday. "Sometimes I imagined we would grow old together. But now I'll grow old and you'll stay young in my heart forever. And I couldn't ever see you stuck behind a picket fence. You were too busy looking at the sky and the horizon to which it led. "Remember when we climbed to the top of the earth, through the bushes and the thorns we were covered in dirt.

First, the bad news: The Andromeda galaxy, an agglomeration of 1 trillion stars that is visible to the naked eye, is hurtling through space at 250,000 miles per hour — and it's coming right at us. What's more, NASA astronomers in Baltimore said Thursday, while Andromeda barrels into our Milky Way, a companion galaxy will join in what the space agency is billing as a "titanic collision. " Now, the good news: With Andromeda still 2.5 million light years away, the collision won't take place for another 4 billion years, the astronomers said.

After creating the most detailed analysis yet of what the Milky Way looks like, astronomers say a long bar of stars cuts on an angle through the center of the galaxy that includes the sun and planet Earth. Some scientists have suspected the presence of the stellar bar, but the survey led by two Wisconsin astronomers shows the bar is far longer than previously believed, and at a specific angle. The skinny bar is made up of old and red stars and is about 27,000 light years in length, about 7,000 light years longer than previously believed.

A team of astronomers from the University of Maryland and Harvard has discovered a newborn star at the edge of our Milky Way galaxy, challenging the conventional view that stars aren't likely to form so far from the gas-rich stellar nurseries found closer to the galaxy's core."

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. -- Astrophysicists announced yesterday that they have discovered what appears to be a monster fountain of antimatter erupting outward from the core of the Milky Way.They said the discovery would compel them to alter their image of the disk-shaped galaxy. In the revised image, it is as if a burst of steam were spurting upward from the yolk of a fried egg.The discovery, reported at a meeting in Williamsburg, was made using the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, a satellite launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration six years ago. The four instruments aboard the observatory detect, measure and record gamma rays: invisible rays that have higher energies than all other forms of radiation, including X-rays.

WASHINGTON -- The search for life in outer space got a boost yesterday as astronomers announced the discovery of a newborn solar system -- 200 light years away in our own Milky Way galaxy -- that looks a lot like a snapshot of our own solar system in its infancy."

Our Milky Way galaxy has a companion. It's a dwarf. And a tough one at that.Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Rosemary Wyse says a cigar-shaped "dwarf spheroidal galaxy," one-tenth the diameter of the Milky Way, has been orbiting our galactic home for 10 billion years.This galaxy -- dubbed the "Sagittarius dwarf galaxy" -- has been diving right through the Milky Way's swirling disk of stars during each billion-year orbit, she said.It has survived the plunges without its stars being swept up by the Milky Way's huge gravitational forces.

First, the bad news: The Andromeda galaxy, an agglomeration of 1 trillion stars that is visible to the naked eye, is hurtling through space at 250,000 miles per hour — and it's coming right at us. What's more, NASA astronomers in Baltimore said Thursday, while Andromeda barrels into our Milky Way, a companion galaxy will join in what the space agency is billing as a "titanic collision. " Now, the good news: With Andromeda still 2.5 million light years away, the collision won't take place for another 4 billion years, the astronomers said.

After creating the most detailed analysis yet of what the Milky Way looks like, astronomers say a long bar of stars cuts on an angle through the center of the galaxy that includes the sun and planet Earth. Some scientists have suspected the presence of the stellar bar, but the survey led by two Wisconsin astronomers shows the bar is far longer than previously believed, and at a specific angle. The skinny bar is made up of old and red stars and is about 27,000 light years in length, about 7,000 light years longer than previously believed.

For years astronomers have suspected that deep in the heart of our galaxy lurks a dark secret - a colossal black hole. Now an international team of scientists has gathered the strongest evidence yet that an object in the center of the Milky Way called Sagittarius A is not only a black hole, but one roughly the size of 3 million of our suns. "I think it's settled now: Black holes really exist," said Rainer Schoedel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, who led the international team that made the discovery.

WASHINGTON - Scientists say they have found new evidence that spiral galaxies such as our own Milky Way are surrounded by halos of hot gas fed by bubbles and fountains of exhaust from stellar explosions. Over millions of years, the gas cools and rains back down into the galaxy, providing the raw material for the next cycle of star birth. The findings, reported this week to the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, were based on data gathered by the orbiting Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer telescope, known as FUSE, built and operated for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University.

On a dark night many years ago, when Philip Ianna was only 13 or 14, he was riding in a truck loaded with other Boy Scouts from Philadelphia, when nature called. They were perhaps an hour northwest of the city, headed for a weekend of country camping. The driver pulled over, and the boys piled out to relieve themselves. But while everyone else looked down, Ianna looked up. "I still remember how black the sky was, the uncountable number of stars, numbers I had never imagined might be there," he says.

After a bumpy start, a Johns Hopkins-based orbiting observatory has begun to send back important new findings on the life cycles of stars and galaxies. Scientists working with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite told astronomers meeting in Atlanta yesterday they have found clouds of hot gas surrounding our Milky Way galaxy, blown there by the explosions of dying stars. FUSE has also given astronomers their first look at the vast, wispy clouds of cold molecular hydrogen -- the raw material for new stars -- long-supposed to float throughout the Milky Way. "The FUSE observatory is now open for routine business," said Hopkins physics professor H. Warren Moos, principal FUSE investigator.

Try to imagine a star so big that it would fill all of the solar system within the orbit of Earth, which is 93 million miles from the sun. A star so turbulent that its eruptions would spread a cloud of gases spanning four light-years, the distance from the sun to the nearest star. A star so powerful that it glows with the energy of 10 million suns, making it the brightest ever observed in our galaxy, the Milky Way.A star so big and bright should be unimaginable, according to some theories of star formation.

WASHINGTON -- Feeding a black hole the size of our solar system, it turns out, is as simple as tossing it an occasional galaxy.Yesterday, scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore released spectacular photos of a vast galaxy called Centaurus A, snapped as it swallows the scraps of a much smaller galaxy that first blundered into its path 500 million to 1 billion years ago.The Hubble Space Telescope's infrared camera detected what...

From Day One, we knew it wouldn't be easy. We were trying to plan for ourselves and our two kids; for Martha's uncle from New Jersey; and for his daughter from Israel and her two children. Our uncle wanted to see the Gettysburg battlefield, and we wanted to show off our favorite amusement park (Idlewild in Ligonier, Pa.) before we headed west on the rest of our vacation. When we travel, we keep our kids' morale up by finding hotels with pools, but our cousin didn't want a hotel -- and most bed and breakfasts don't want children.

WASHINGTON -- Feeding a black hole the size of our solar system, it turns out, is as simple as tossing it an occasional galaxy.Yesterday, scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore released spectacular photos of a vast galaxy called Centaurus A, snapped as it swallows the scraps of a much smaller galaxy that first blundered into its path 500 million to 1 billion years ago.The Hubble Space Telescope's infrared camera detected what...